Outsourcing Thievery

"Call center employees working for an Indian software company, MSource, supposedly used confidential client information to transfer client funds to themselves. The alleged perpetrators used the personal information of four NY-based clients to transfer ~$350,000 (Rs. 1.5 crores) in their names, a large sum in Indian currency. They were caught after the victims alerted the bank officials in the US, who then traced the crime to the Indian city of Pune. While the name of the bank has not been revealed, the article indicates that the bank in question is Citibank." SlashDot

I'm trying to think what to say on this subject. I can only say that I have expected something like this. Just because people are from a country that has an official religion, doesn't make them honest. These people stole from Americans while in another country. I'm pretty sure U. S. laws do not apply. That is one of the big reasons companies outsource in the first place, to avoid the laws and liability in their own country. That goes both ways. Apparently, they are not paying these people enough to keep them from thinking this is an option. The thieves used the money for mobile phones, cars and such.
When you read the article I infer that the bank was alerted by a third party. I bet someone who was asked by the thieves to cash one of the checks turned them in.

Email at the Office
Every day lately about 8:30 or 9:00 our email crashes. Normally, it comes up again after lunch. It has happened every day this week. IS took the primary server off line Monday "to replace a piece of hardware" and now it is going down every day at the same time. I suppose that is an improvement, because before , it was going down every day on a random basis. I wonder if they replaced the BUS clock.
It never ceases to amaze me how much our company depends on email to work. I've noticed people writing the content of their email in a Word document and attaching it to an email. I have a hard time with this because that bloats the size of the email several times. People just don't know any better. They teach Word, Powerpoint and Excel in school. They don't teach responsible use of computers though.
There have been times where the whole network goes nuts and I can still get to an outside machine to do some work. A couple of years ago, the power went out for a couple of hours. I swear, the network going down is that disruptive. I can't remember the last time the phones went out at my office, but it seems people are more productive when they have their phone taken away.

Camera
I keep flip-flopping on the camera. $1200 ($1000 for the camera and lens, $200 for memory cards) is allot of money to me. It is 8 megapixel. That sounds good for cameras at the moment. You can get a 7 megapixel phone from Samsung. If I'm at a party or out screwing around, I will take five megapixel images. If I'm on vacation at the Grand Canyon, I want 100 megapixel images. Nothing will satisfy me in that case. This camera is a high quality image camera as well. It has pretty fair low light imaging. There are tons of pluses. The one huge minus is that next week they will cut the price in half or competition will catch up and offer an amazing deal to steel Canon's cloths. That will always be the case. There will always be something better on the horizon. There is a threshold. When the item is a couple of weeks salary, I bump into a wall.
If I do go ahead and buy this camera, I here by make a promise to myself to not give myself crap about the price or what comes out the very next day. I know, you make the best decision on the day you need to make it. You go with it and stick with it. If I didn't make this promise to myself, I would never end up buying new computers or cameras.